Tony Dejak/Associated PressIn the Indians' farewell game last March in Winter Haven, Fla., Bob Feller delivered a first pitch and acknowledged the fans who have cherished him for over 70 years.

He will go to the next Indians Fantasy Camp and perhaps pitch one time through the lineup against the plumbers and insurance salesmen the way he usually does. He will throw from the pitching rubber, like always. He will not tolerate the presence of a protective screen near him.

"I'm not a batting practice pitcher," growled Bob Feller, who is alive and still high kicking at 90.

Sunday at his birthday party at Progressive Field, he blew out the candles on a baseball-shaped birthday cake, as golden autumn light streamed through the windows of the club lounge. Once, it would have been World Series light, but the game sold its soul to television. Feller hates that because night games deprive the next generation of fans of memories.

He should know. He made enough of them in his time.

He is the face of the Indians' franchise, more than Chief Wahoo ever was. Feller was born when (wait for it) Woodrow Wilson was president. He didn't mark time once he was old enough to be running around the family farm in Iowa. He knew he wanted to be a major league pitcher from the start. His high leg kick on the mound was necessary because he intended to cover a lot of ground in the game's history.

He became the youngest pitcher [at 17] to win a game after signing with the Indians for one dollar and an autographed baseball. "I don't know where either one of them is now," he said.

Cleveland fans knew where Feller was, though. He was spinning yarns in the Arizona sun; signing photographs in the bright Florida light after the Tribe moved its spring training there; and, when it's 2009 and it's in Arizona again, "I'll be there, God willing," he said.

He attends more home games than seems possible for a man of his years. Herb Score, who might have been the left-handed "Rapid" Robert, got hit in the eye by the ball and later retired as a broadcaster. Rocky Colavito got traded. The Indians changed Wahoo caricatures, changed stadiums, and changed uniforms. Feller stayed the same, always here, always blunt as a shillelagh, always sharp as the break on the curve that complemented his fastball.

For overmatched batters, the heater set up the hook, the way thunder and hail set up locusts in the plagues of ancient Egypt.

When Jaret Wright was the great pitching hope in the 1990s, Feller off-handedly suggested he could work with Wright on an overhand curve. "You throw it like you're pulling down a window shade," Feller said, reaching in front of him to demonstrate.

For most human beings, such a curve would bounce anemically in the dirt, 55 feet from the plate. Feller's plummeting curve helped him pitch three no-hitters and 12 one-hitters.

Being 90 allows a man to speak his mind. Many times, Feller has said what he thought of Pete Rose, which was not much, after Rose was kicked off the Baseball Hall of Fame ballot. He once gave an impromptu lecture on how easy it would be to strike out Manny Ramirez, a future Hall of Famer, and Albert Belle, who would have made it except for his sociopathic tendencies.

"Bust a fastball under their chins, then a slider low and away on the outside corner," said Feller.

This was all pure Feller -- the fierce pride he takes in the Hall of Fame as its second-oldest living player behind the Boston Red Sox' Bobby Doerr, the combative acceptance that intimidation is part of sports, and the generous assumption that such an unhittable, bull's-eye slider was within reach, just as was the window-shade curve.

Some of his optimism comes from how easily he wore his athletic ability, but more of it comes from his experiences on the battleship USS Alabama in the Navy in World War II. His generation was full of ordinary men and women who did extraordinary things in extreme circumstances.

For all that has happened in his tall-tales life, he said many times that he would trade part of his career to play one more game of catch with his father in the barn. It is baseball's universal ache of the past, its "Field of Dreams" moment. The arc of such throws ties us together and defines everyone who loves the game, including a living legend who threw a ball that bent history.

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